Breaking Open the Head
and the Psychedelic Renaissance: A Month-long Seminar
A month-long seminar on the modern world's relationship to psychedelics and the visionary state. What is the future of the psychedelic movement?
Nearly twenty years ago, I published Breaking Open the Head, my first book, on psychedelic shamanism. I began writing that book as a result of an existential crisis. I grew up in New York City where my parents and everyone I knew were committed believers in scientific materialism. According to the materialist paradigm, consciousness is entirely based in the brain. There is no soul, no spirit, no possibility for any continuity of our being after death. In my late twenties, I found this increasingly intolerable. It made life meaningless, a pointless joke. I realized that both myself and my culture were suffering from nihilism. The ecological crisis we had unleashed was an expression of underlying, inexpressible despair.
Photo credit: Abdiel Gutiérrez Granados for PapayaPlaya, Tulum
In my crisis, I recalled my psychedelic trips in college. These trips offered tantalizing suggestions that there might be “something else,” some inner region of psychic life, some dimension of consciousness, that could not be explained away by the reductive scientific worldview. I decided to explore this area for myself. At the time, it was an unusual decision.
Back then, in New York City in the late 1990s, psychedelics were utterly dismissed by the culture. They were legally taboo, of course, but an ambience of ridicule also clung to them. The New York Times dismissed them as “toys of the hippie generation.” They were seen as unserious, meaningless, stupid — not something that mature adults should bother to explore. With hindsight, I believe that Breaking Open the Head, along with a number of other books and pioneers, helped to change the consensus view of psychedelics in the mainstream. This cultural repositioning allowed for the amazing renaissance in scientific research and personal exploration which has flourished over the last decades.
As I started to take psychedelics again in the late 1990s, while studying their ancient history of human use by indigenous cultures around the world, it became clear to me that the establishment wields repression and ridicule as weapons to maintain the status quo. Psychedelics weren’t banned and forbidden because they are particularly dangerous — alcohol and tobacco have far worse health consequences. They were banned because they threaten the underlying beliefs and mindset of our hyper-commodified Capitalist culture.
For Breaking Open the Head, I traveled to Gabon, on the equator of West Africa, where I was initiated into the Bwiti tribe which uses Iboga, a visionary root bark, as its sacrament. In the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador, I stayed with the Secoya, an extraordinary culture that has been pushed to the edge of survival by oil companies and missionaries. A handful of Secoya elders still maintain an ancient lineage using ayahuasca in ceremony. I visited the Mazatec indians in the mountains of Oaxaca, where the banker Gordon Wasson rediscovered psilocybin for the modern world in the early 1950s. As a result of my direct experience and ongoing investigations, my belief system changed radically. I realized the mystical or shamanic worldview was valid and that scientific materialism had serious gaps.
I interviewed the late chemist Sasha Shulgin, who created hundreds of new psychedelics and cataloged them in his books. Shulgin is responsible for the modern interest in MDMA. He also discovered 2CB, among many compounds. I visited Burning Man for the first time in 2000, writing about it for Rolling Stone. In the Black Rock desert of Nevada, I was amazed to find the thriving underground psychedelic culture of the West Coast, which has increasingly merged with the mainstream.
As one major theme of Breaking Open the Head, I explored the fraught relationship between Western (European and American) culture and the visionary experience since the Renaissance, as reflected by artists and thinkers from Shakespeare to Artaud, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, and Terence McKenna. I became fascinated with ideas from the German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin, who explored mescaline and hashish in the 1920s. Benjamin mused: “The most passionate examination of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. . . . Not to mention that most terrible drug — ourselves — which we take in solitude.”
Crossing the threshold into 2021, we find our world in a perilous state. Coronavirus still rages while racist, authoritarian movements grow around the world. We are still failing to address the ecological mega-crisis despite terrifying warning signs like the recent fires across California and Australia and the Methane erupting from frozen peat bogs in Siberia.
One bright spot in our time is the surging popularity of psychedelics, along with efforts to change the laws around them. Around the world, scientific and medical research reveals their benefits — and we keep learning more. However, in its effort to get these substances accepted by the mainstream, the psychedelic movement chose to focus relentlessly on their medical and therapeutic benefits. They suppressed the shamanic, occult, and paranormal aspects of psychedelic illumination. The result of this has been a dumbing down and flattening of the discourse around psychedelia, making it easier for our corporate culture to absorb it.
Psychedelics have moved from the chaotic, countercultural edge to the mainstream. Psychedelic companies are now seen as “hot” investment opportunities. One company, Compass Pathways, backed by Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, raised more than $100 million, reaching a market cap of over $1 billion, although they are still years away from bringing a product to the market. Business magazines report breathlessly on this trend, for instance, one online journal recently reported on a new company that was “launching the Uber Eats or DoorDash of Intravenous based home Ketamine delivery.” Inexorably, Capitalism is doing what it does: Seeking to absorb the psychedelic experience into its profit-driven calculus. With hindsight, this development seems inevitable. Now we must consider its consequences.
In this month-long seminar, we will delve into the original explorations and core insights from Breaking Open the Head and apply them to this complex moment — this juncture in which psychedelics, medicine, and Capitalism are fusing together, with ambiguous implications for the future. Questions to be explored include the following:
What is the proper role of psychedelic shamanism in our postmodern world?
Beyond therapeutic use, what other potentials do psychedelics have, for the individual and society?
What does the embrace of psychedelics by corporate Capitalism mean for the future of the movement?
What does initiation mean in our time? How does one know when one is initiated? What steps can you can take to get there?
What are the best practices, optimal set and setting, to explore psychedelics today?
Can psychedelics catalyze our latent psychic abilities?
What important insights can we gain from modernist writers and artists who explored psychedelics and visionary states over the last centuries?
What can we learn from indigenous cultures who preserve shamanic traditions involving ancient knowledge of entheogenic plants?
What is the meaning of the psychedelic experience for humanity’s future?
How do psychedelics heal people from trauma, depression, and anxiety?
What are the dangers and dark sides of psychedelics?
What happens when we meld psychedelic shamanism with cutting-edge technologies?
Can psychedelic shamanism help to answer our basic questions about the nature of reality: Why are we here? Is there any existence after death? What is our individual purpose? What is humanity’s purpose as a whole?
Week One: Psychedelic History
I introduce myself and describe my early shamanic journeys in Gabon, Ecuador, Brazil, and elsewhere. We look at initiation practices found in shamanic cultures worldwide. What is the traditional purpose of initiation? What are the basic characteristics of initiatory trials? We explore the history of psychedelic shamanism to gain a context for today’s psychedelic renaissance: What do we know about the origins of shamanism around the world, from Siberia to Ancient Greece to South America? Psychedelics and Europe from the Mysteries of Eleusis until today. Christianity developed out of Gnosticism, rejecting initiation for indoctrination. The Gnostic Christ says: “Open the doors for yourself, so you will know what is.” The demonization of visionary states and indigenous plant knowledge in the Middle Ages, with the inquisition and the burning of the witches. European alchemy and the quest for the Prima Mater or alchemical gold. Discussion on how this history of repression has impacted our own lives and society, and how we overcome it now by reintegrating visionary states and intuition.
Week Two: Modernism and Psychedelics
We dive into the works of artists and thinkers who explored the visionary state, from the Renaissance to Postmodernism: Shakespeare, The Romantics. Also the encounters of anthropologists such as Richard Schultes, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Michael Harner with Amazonian shamanism. What can we learn from the psychedelic insights of Walter Benjamin, Antonin Artaud, Ernst Junger, Henri Michaux, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, the Beat Generation (Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs), and so on? Rediscovery of psychedelics in the 1960s. Timothy Leary and John Lilly. Repression of psychedelics at the end of the 1960s. The post-60s psychedelic philosophy of Terence McKenna and Jose Arguelles. The evolution of modern psychedelic thought with Jeremy Narby, Tom Roberts, Rick Strassman, Kat Harrison, Wade Davis, and others. Discussion and sharing.
Week Three: Visionary Plants and Mind-Manifesting Compounds
We look at the current landscape of natural and artificial psychedelic compounds: Ayahuasca, peyote, mushrooms, Iboga, San Pedro, DMT, Salvia, Bufo, 2CB, Ketamine, MDMA, and so on. We review the work of Sasha and Anne Shulgin. We look at chemistry, set and setting, and other factors that influence the effects of these substances. What do we know about their varying capacities from studies at the Imperial College in London, research sponsored by MAPs, and other initiatives? We will look at recent studies of psilocybin, DMT, LSD, ayahuasca, and Ketamine. What are we learning about how chemicals like LSD and DMT affect the brain? What about the dark sides and dangers of psychedelics? Discussion on how they enhance creativity and our capacity for innovative problem-solving.
Week Four: The Mainstreaming of Psychedelics and the Future
We explore the current status of the psychedelic movement including the increasing professionalization and corporatization of the psychedelic realm, seeing the good and bad sides to this. New career paths are opening up as psychedelic therapists, integration specialists, microdosing coaches, and so on. The financial landscape includes hundreds of new companies raising investment in the psychedelic space. As Capitalism sees profit potential in the future of psychedelics, it becomes likely that the legal taboos around them will be loosened. We have already seen several states and counties in the US decriminalize psychedelic use. This trend will continue. At the same time, as the psychedelic movement has focused narrowly on personal healing it has ignored some of the most important and fascinating aspects of these experiences. For instance, that psychedelics can reveal latent psychic and paranormal abilities. Also, in moments of transformative insight, we see the potential for a deeper transformation of our society and culture away from consumerism, linear technological progress, and exploitation of resources toward partnership and symbiosis. Discussion on how psychedelic insights can help humanity address its collective trauma and move beyond our currently broken systems toward something better.
Release the ibogaine!